Wednesday, February 7, 2018

No, Michelle Cretella, being transgender is not "marketed to children"

Michelle Cretella is a hate group leader. She is president of the American College of Pediatricians, a small splinter group with a membership of about 200. The real peer group is the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Cretella is also out of her depth. Children with gender dysphoria are treated by psychiatrists. Michelle Cretella is not a psychiatrists. Currently, she is not even a licensed physician. I'll get back to Cretella shortly.

The findings are quite complex and based on a self-assessment of ninth and eleventh graders by the children themselves. Among the questions is this:

Do you consider yourself transgender, genderqueer, genderfluid, or unsure about your gender identity? (yes or no).

If you do the math from the tables, 2.6% of the kids answered yes to a question that they may, or may not, have understood. Gender nonconforming, for example, means the degree to which someone's appearance or manner deviates from norms for their natal sex. Therefore, it is a measurement and not something that can be responded to with yes or no.

I have no idea what those terms mean to a 14-year-old ninth grader. The evaluation was not designed to evaluate the size of the population. Rather it was designed to evaluate the quality of health care received by that population.

Testing the size of that population would require a number of lengthy explanations and questions. Many would involve asking questions that are answered with a scale, from one to 10. Even the term transgender means different things to different people.

Ms. Root wanders on:

Experts say the statewide study can be used to estimate the number of transgender teens in those grades across the whole United States, which would mean numbers are up from a UCLA study last year that estimated only 0.7 percent of 13-to-17-year-olds consider themselves transgender.

Who on earth are these so-called experts? One cannot accurately compare transgender teens to teens who are transgender, genderqueer, genderfluid, or unsure about their gender identity. The second group is going to be larger than the first group. Is that not perfectly obvious?

Enter Michelle Cretella (the mad scene):

Dr. Michelle Cretella, president of the American College of Pediatricians, says this is not an isolated finding.

Dr. Cretella told CBN News the reason transgenderism is on the rise is due to it being marketed to children and teens.
[…]
"It's more like the promotion of transgenderism as an identity is capturing the attention of troubled teens and they're latching onto this going, 'Yes, this is where I fit in'," she said.

Gender dysphoria affects some teens who are anything but troubled (other than by the condition itself). What is troubling is the information being spread about their condition by religious crackpots.

As I said, Cretella is out of her depth. She is also a staunch proponent of thoroughly discredited conversion therapy which she now seeks to apply to kids with gender dysphoria. She is deliberately misinforming parents. She does this because Cretella needs to defend the teachings of the Catholic Church. It does not matter that she is harming children. She believes that Church teachings are inerrant. Fortunately, she doesn't seem to be setting witches on fire.

Hopefully, kids with gender dysphoria are being treated by clinicians who are not out of their depth (and also not members of the Catholic Medical Society). Presumably we can rely on them morMichelle Cretellae than we can rely on Cretella. The notion that a psychiatric condition is being “marketed” to children is patently absurd. Spreading that preposterous idea is harmful to those kids and their families.

Gender dysphoria has nothing to do with Christianity just as leukemia has nothing to do with Christianity. Being transgender as a means of mitigating the suffering caused by gender dysphoria has nothing to do with Christianity just as chemotherapy has nothing to do with Christianity. Apparently careful thought and critical thinking are also detached from the fundamentalist forms of Christianity.